Comments

This is a note to let you know that I have just added a patch titled
x86/mm: Check if PUD is large when validating a kernel
to the linux-3.5.y-queue branch of the 3.5.y.z extended stable tree
which can be found at:
http://kernel.ubuntu.com/git?p=ubuntu/linux.git;a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/linux-3.5.y-queue
If you, or anyone else, feels it should not be added to this tree, please
reply to this email.
For more information about the 3.5.y.z tree, see
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/Dev/ExtendedStable
Thanks.
-Herton
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From 6188e408d02d10d48f193d357e271ac9a046871a Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Date: Mon, 11 Feb 2013 14:52:36 +0000
Subject: [PATCH] x86/mm: Check if PUD is large when validating a kernel
address
commit 0ee364eb316348ddf3e0dfcd986f5f13f528f821 upstream.
A user reported the following oops when a backup process reads
/proc/kcore:
BUG: unable to handle kernel paging request at ffffbb00ff33b000
IP: [<ffffffff8103157e>] kern_addr_valid+0xbe/0x110
[...]
Call Trace:
[<ffffffff811b8aaa>] read_kcore+0x17a/0x370
[<ffffffff811ad847>] proc_reg_read+0x77/0xc0
[<ffffffff81151687>] vfs_read+0xc7/0x130
[<ffffffff811517f3>] sys_read+0x53/0xa0
[<ffffffff81449692>] system_call_fastpath+0x16/0x1b
Investigation determined that the bug triggered when reading
system RAM at the 4G mark. On this system, that was the first
address using 1G pages for the virt->phys direct mapping so the
PUD is pointing to a physical address, not a PMD page.
The problem is that the page table walker in kern_addr_valid() is
not checking pud_large() and treats the physical address as if
it was a PMD. If it happens to look like pmd_none then it'll
silently fail, probably returning zeros instead of real data. If
the data happens to look like a present PMD though, it will be
walked resulting in the oops above.
This patch adds the necessary pud_large() check.
Unfortunately the problem was not readily reproducible and now
they are running the backup program without accessing
/proc/kcore so the patch has not been validated but I think it
makes sense.
Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>Reviewed-by: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.coM>Reviewed-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.cz>Acked-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Cc: linux-mm@kvack.org
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20130211145236.GX21389@suse.de
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>Signed-off-by: Herton Ronaldo Krzesinski <herton.krzesinski@canonical.com>
---
arch/x86/include/asm/pgtable.h | 5 +++++
arch/x86/mm/init_64.c | 3 +++
2 files changed, 8 insertions(+)
--
1.7.9.5